


Ephemeral

by MartinEA



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, and old, and they flirt a bit, because theyre super domestic, graphic descriptions of print making, im sorry not sorry, the most established relationship, yusuf and nicolo create art in this one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:01:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29536512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MartinEA/pseuds/MartinEA
Summary: He saw himself in them, however peculiar that might have sounded. An image of the people; plain, big and boring, but a protector nonetheless.“Are you thinking about socialist art again, Nicolo?” Yusuf’s voice, tinged with amusement, broke him out of his revelry. He looked up from the postament, where his still-vague sculpture was forming under a mass of clay and wire, to see his ink-stained husband standing in the doorway of their atelier.“The only good thing to come out of the soviet union,” Nicolo replied serenely, then divined the reason for his visit. “Did your press get jammed again?”OR: Nicolo is a sculptor, Yusuf makes prints, and an immortal muses on art.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Kudos: 53





	Ephemeral

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this 1. because I love the technicalities of art and 2. I wanted to bring my own spin on Yusuf as an artist (oh Yusuf is a painter? He paints on his silly little canvases with his silly little brushes? YAWN (I can say this as a painter)) and bring Nicolo in on it, because he reminds me of my sculpture teacher and I think he's the type of guy who's patient enough to twist wires for an hour

Downtimes for an immortal were fraught with certain dark feelings, that lingered in crevices, solemn and heavy. A single human lifetime was enough to fill itself with the gruesome horrors of existence; hundreds were enough to overflow and overwhelm even the most peaceful moments.

Andromache and Sebastien dealt with it by drinking to forget. 

Nicolo and Yusuf had their art. 

There were some, for whom art was an ordeal, with which they persevered nonetheless, because it was as necessary as breathing. To create for them was just as intrinsic as breathing or eating, despite each creation being seeped in blood.

Others created for the joy to create. Their art was born of levity and came about only when their soul rested easy and free; any struggle deterred them from their craft.

Yusuf and Nicolo, who’d been around to see the life and death of hundreds of art movements, fell in neither category. 

They flitted about from century to century, mingling with the artistic types, which appealed to them, and picked up a thing or two, but never indulged in the higher values of that, which they considered “real art”. Superior genres, subjects, themes...they all changed as time went on. Classicism came and went, was then replaced with the dogma of the modernists, who proclaimed that art came not from mathematical symmetry, but the artist’s subjective vision and expression. Only then to be superseded by the contemporaries, for whom abstract form was the single most important aspect.

“High art” was tied to power, relative and fragile, and being involved in it was a headache, so neither of the two stuck around or subscribed to any beliefs. The simple craft of it, though, was the thing that drew them to it. 

If one were to ask them, they’d say they were impartial to technique and medium, but that would be a barefaced lie.

Nicolo, who appreciated the ache in his body after a good day of labour (perhaps a leftover of being a devout catholic in the middle ages), loved the physicality of sculpture. Not the white marble, chiseled away in a fit of divine inspiration, to reveal the palpably smooth form of David. But the wrangling of thick wires and bending them to his will for armature, hauling sacks of cement for molds and doling them out carefully for the right consistency, molding thickened clay with work-strengthened fingers in smooth planes to reveal the vague shape of a bird’s wing... 

His favourite movement was soc-realism, not because of the propaganda, but the solid, geometric planes, which were at once brutish, but also beautiful and intimate in their monumental strength and stability. He saw himself in them, however peculiar that might have sounded. An image of the people; plain, big and boring, but a protector nonetheless. 

“Are you thinking about socialist art again, Nicolo?” Yusuf’s voice, tinged with amusement, broke him out of his revelry. He looked up from the postament, where his still-vague sculpture was forming under a mass of clay and wire, to see his ink-stained husband standing in the doorway of their atelier. 

“The only good thing to come out of the soviet union,” Nicolo replied serenely, then divined the reason for his visit. “Did your press get jammed again?”

Yusuf raised his blackened fingers with a wry grin on his face, as if to show his helplessness before the ineffable power of the steel machine. Nicolo wiped his own sticky hands on a rag, which he then placed over the drying clay, before making his way over to Yusuf, brushing briefly and lovingly against him as they both made their way to the adjoining room. Where Nicolo’s atelier was a sparse open space, only furnished with a few postaments in use, and lockers, where he kept some of his materials, Yusuf’s atelier with his press was a mess of papers, drypoint needles, plates and drying racks, which had prints drying hanging on them. 

Chemical bottles were scattered all around with flat basins, filled half-way with water to prepare the paper in, interspersed. There were oil-stained rags strewn left and right, adding neatly to the chaos of the room.

Nicolo shot Yusuf a pointed look, leaving their usual argument about tidiness unspoken. Yusuf, in turn, pointedly ignored him. Which was also what he'd done 30 years ago when he'd set a chemical fire to the last building they'd used as workshop. The only thing that spared him from Nicolo's lecture had been the fact that he'd also died in that same fire and the burns he'd got from it had healed slowly.

The fact that he was blasè about the dangerous chemicals he'd left laying around once again, uncapped, only spoke to the saying, that the only animal to stumble on the same rock twice, is man.

Yusuf stood next to the sizeable, black press in the corner, and tried cranking the lever that would roll the flat base underneath the cylinder and out through to the other end. It only squealed briefly, before stoppering suddenly midway through.

Nicolo bent down to look at the gears and the crank itself, then the cylinder, and pronounced, "It just needs a good yank."

Yusuf did another half-hearted attempt at cranking, before giving up and wheezing theatricly. He wiped the inky hand across his forehead, leaving a smear behind. "No can do. I'm not strong enough and the oil on the plexiglass is drying. If only there was a big, strong man to do it for me." 

He batted his pretty eyelashes at him, the picture of innocence. Nicolo, charmed despite himself, smiled, and shuffled around him to wrap his own hands around it. It did take a lot of strength to pull, the wheel giving him grief at every tug, squealing painfully loudly, but he managed to get the print all the way across, the clattering of the base notifying him when it was time to stop. 

Yusuf did a little shimmy as he went past him and carefully lifted the cover, revealing the paper, which was contorted around the shape of the plate. Nicolo observed as the love of his life held his breath and, with concentration known to him only during print-making and in no other aspect of his life, he slowly peeled the paper away, revealing a flurry of black, grey and white. 

He hurried past Nicolo to lay it on his working table, over a huge sheet of sketching paper and newspapers. He followed closely behind and peered over his shoulder to look at the finished print and see what was causing his husband’s dissatisfied hum.

The print was a bit bigger than an A3 sheet, the corners were plate had met paper softened and smooth, so the dent was slight. After Yusuf was forbidden from making etching prints on copper plates without supervision, he’d started experimenting with cheaper materials, that needed no acid.

“They have these cheap, wobbly plexiglass plates that leave this greyish tint when printing, right? Well, if I block areas out, it leaves some places white, and that’s a whole three tones I’m getting from dry point,” Yusuf had explained a couple of days ago, after going to some Polish professor’s workshop. Nicolo had listened to him carefully as he went on, happy that Yusuf was so excited about a project, inserting no opinions of his own. The moment he’d started ranting about abstract expressionism, though, he’d completely immersed himself in his own preliminary sketches. 

Now the product of Yusuf’s experimentation was in front of him in it all its ethereal resplendence. 

Where Nicolo and Yusuf varied in their art, was that, while Nicolo relied heavily on correct anatomy and rigid composition to make up for his lack of artistry, Yusuf leaned heavily on his own and negated any laws of physics for the sake of getting his ideas across.

The subject was nothing short of fantastical; a small boy with a painfully twisted neck was looking woefully with big, glassy eyes at a passing dove, its wings twisting and soaring as it formed rings behind itself, which in turn twisted and turned into speckled, sparkling planets. Cast shadows, proportion and meaning had been set aside and in their absence was Yusuf’s beautifully crafted nonsense.

“I feel like I’ve seen him somewhere,” Nicolo muttered, resting his chin on his husband’s shoulder, who then shrugged with the other shoulder in response.

“I wouldn’t know, I saw him in a dream. Maybe we have met him. Years ago.” Or centuries. The human mind couldn’t conjure new faces, so it pulled from memories. He could’ve been one in billions living today that they’d passed by, or one in… more than billions, who had ever lived in their 900 years of existence. 

“Going back to illustrating dreams? Very… Freudian of you.”

Yusuf growled and shook him off. “I’m not trying to interpret anything. I just got inspired. There’s something about it that’s bothering me, though.” 

Nicolo looked closer at it and pointed to a particularly black area. “You’ve ah...what’s the word...Suffocated it there. You’ve dug too far in.”

Yusuf inspected the plate and gave a long-suffering sigh, before cracking his neck so loudly it was concerning, even though he was immortal.

“Ah! Enough of this! Prints are tedious and a bore. I shall take up painting and say to hell with it.”

Nicolo only leaned down to kiss him on his bristled cheek. He knew Yusuf had only enjoyed painting when it had been a necessity to stretch his own canvases and mix his own pigments. To have them pre-made and readily available at every art store bored him to tears. 

It was a stickling point that Nicolo understood well himself, but that Nile couldn’t comprehend. Perhaps that came with being old.

Their art was an ephemeral thing. They couldn’t take it with them when traveling or burning old identities. At best they could hide it somewhere and have it uncovered centuries later for an exhibit on “unkown artists from the 16th century” or “queer art without a name from pre-world war one”. But whenever that happened they were forced to confront their own selves from the past and that was always a discomfiting, albeit nostalgic, experience. 

So they created with the knowledge that what they made would be destroyed. Clay remade thousands of times into new forms, linocuts burned or repurposed to nothing. 

They were mediocre artists, who’d been there to see art develop, morph and regress, along the ever-expanding coil of time. Their craft was both born of joy and pain, but also simply from the fact that they were alive and would continue to be so for a very long time. 


End file.
